A Leader for All Seasons: Resolution in the Face of Illness

 

In the course of writing about the importance of legacy, and because it is apple (and Apple) season, allow me to share with you some additional points about the influence an inspiring leader can bequeath to his or her supporters.

 

With regard to Steve Jobs, a singular personality of charisma, showmanship, excitement (not for nothing did he describe Apple’s devices as “insanely great”) and aesthetic brilliance, his legacy is clear: Create excellent products, period.

 

His successor, Tim Cook, need not bother himself with the answer to the question, “What would Steve do?” The query is itself not worth considering because, one, Jobs was explicit that that question should not confound his colleagues; and two, while it is futile to think about where he would have placed this button on this or that iPhone, or whether he would have even endorsed the look and feel of items only now being assembled and shipped to consumers worldwide, the people of Apple will forever know how to design goods of unmistakable artistry and engineering genius.

 

The real legacy of a leader is, instead, a matter of grace and comportment – how, in the midst of private travails and physical pain, that individual speaks with the serenity of a pastor, the calmness of a battlefield commander, and the dignity of a proud citizen of his or her community.

 

Nowhere is this example more incredible, and nowhere (sadly) is this story so absent from the most frequently cited remarks of one man, than in Steve Jobs’s appearance before the Cupertino, California, City Council on June 7, 2011.

 

There he introduces his plans for Apple’s new headquarters, the so-called “spaceship,” which will be a 2.8-million-square-feet glass circle that, in Jobs’s words, has “. . . a gorgeous courtyard in the middle, and a lot more. It’s a circle, so it’s curved all the way around. This is not the cheapest way to build something.”

 

This presentation, unlike Jobs’s famed commencement address at Stanford University, or any number of his theatrical performances on behalf of the debut of some “insanely great” products, is his most poignant and unforgettable display of duty.

 

It is the summation of his legacy.

 

With less than four months left to live, his wan body reduced to almost skeletal proportions, covered by the drapery of his loose-fitting “uniform” of black turtleneck, Levi’s 501 jeans, New Balance sneakers and rimless glasses – Jobs speaks fluently and nostalgically of his boyhood, and he enthuses about a future we now know he would never see.

 

From expressing his memories of the Santa Clara Valley, where apricot orchards once decorated the surrounding greenery with a yellow-orange hue, to his precocious decision to call William “Bill” Redington Hewlett (of Hewlett Packard) and ask for some spare parts to build a frequency counter (which resulted in Hewlett giving the teenager summer work), Jobs tells the council members – he tells us and generations to come – how to lead, with affection to our mentors and grand ambitions for our own pursuits.

 

That is the hallmark of a leader. This is how a great visionary secures his or her legacy.

 

In sickness, and in health, a leader describes better days ahead – and moves us forward to “broad, sunlit uplands.”

 

I know of another such leader. Indeed, I am the wife of that man, who is alive in my thoughts and active in the foundation that will forever bear his name: Dr. A. Richard Grossman.

 

A Foundation for Greatness: The Preservation and Enhancement of a Leader’s Legacy

 

The lesson Steve Jobs shows us is the same one my husband’s patients, friends, nurses and fellow surgeons perpetuate: Resolution and charity.

 

And, like Jobs and his refusal to passively succumb to cancer, Richard’s quiet defiance against renal failure – his focus neither blurred nor blinded by the forces arrayed against him – is why, in part, his legacy is so transcendent.

 

A healer and innovator to the end, he is his own man.

 

I applaud Steve Jobs, but I love Richard Grossman.

 

For, it is that love (for his family, including his many “sons” and “daughters” who are the beneficiaries of his philanthropy), that immortalizes a leader.

 

Both men are with us still.

A New Year and an Unpaid Debt: Honoring the Bill of Gratitude

 

A question, in lieu of a New Year’s resolution: To whom do we, as Americans, owe thanks?

 

Do the healthy and wealthy among us have a debt, to be repaid with gratitude to a generous nation? Do our privileged and educated sons and daughters have a moral obligation to repair this country?

 

Do we need, in short, emissaries of goodwill; ambassadors who will brave the unknown (to them) city schools and public housing units, where we continue to consign multiple generations to endure criminal violence, licensed brutality and not-so-benign neglect from overworked teachers, police officers and counselors?

 

These questions are, thus, the same question: What kind of country do we want to be?

 

Shall 2015 be another year where we succumb to statistics, and blind ourselves through the anonymity of numbers rather than the unforgettable images of faces?

 

For the time approaches when social division from an undeclared civil war will become permanent; when our tale of two cities will be a contrast so vivid and unbridgeable that the United States may just as well become a vast wasteland flanked by extraordinary riches at one extreme and uninterrupted darkness at the other.

 

We risk choosing between Beverly Hills and Detroit, which is no choice at all.

 

So, when I write about gratitude – and I have much to be thankful for, starting with the love of a husband whose spirit is my constant companion and the gifts (to do good by doing well) bestowed upon me – I know what the alternative is.

 

It is bleak and unjust . . . for everyone.

 

To the fortunate, of which I am one, I issue this reminder: We must not descend into a land of plutocrats and an impoverished proletariat.

 

We must not allow children – innocents scarred by vermin, and beaten by bullies – to become the raw materials of the State, which will convert flesh and blood into ghastly ingredients; placing these girls and boys, most of whom are black or Hispanic, on a conveyor belt that will clothe and feed them in reformatories, and bus them to county jails and graduate them to prisons, until – after this machinery has stamped, pressed and catalogued each inmate – the armed guards of this substitute “parent” will send each forsaken man-child to his grave.

 

What, then, should we do to stop the passive acceptance of this vicious cycle of delay and denial? In a word: Volunteer!

 

Volunteer because our country needs you.

 

Volunteer because, in the absence of action, the distance between Beverly Hills and Detroit will narrow; the latter will become a fire so great that its perverted lights will burn us all, reducing Americans to the same fate as those late men whose ashes fertilize the soil of potter’s field.

 

Volunteer because, if we remember only fragments of those 31 sacred words of childhood, we are “one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

 

And therein lies the reason to volunteer: Our oneness as a republic, where freedom rings from the “prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire” and “the mighty mountains of New York.”

 

Let freedom ring!

 

Let freedom ring, so opportunity can flourish.

 

Let freedom ring, so we can be a people united again.

 

Let freedom ring, so those who have known nothing but hate can bask in the warmth of hope.

 

Let freedom ring in 2015, and echo every year thereafter because, We the People of the United States hereby resolve to form a more perfect Union.

 

We, those who have secured the blessings of a mighty nation, must be gracious in our words and righteous in our deeds.

 

Let freedom ring!

 

Elizabeth Rice Grossman

 

 

 

 

A Performance versus a Presidency: The Danger of “Selma”

 

Hollywood continues to unintentionally confirm the late Gore Vidal’s assertion that “We are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

The latest example of this phenomenon involves the film “Selma,” where, for purposes of dramatic tension, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and President Lyndon Baines Johnson (“LBJ”) are adversaries.

And yet, history proves the two were, in fact, allies in their joint ambition for Congress to protect and advance the civil rights of minorities.

As filmgoers, we should expect creative license and nuanced depictions of complex figures. “Selma” is a movie, after all, not a documentary; but changing the accuracy of events – erasing their existence altogether – so things can more smoothly follow a falsified three-act structure is an assault against the truth.

Rather than giving us the president as he was, perhaps the only president who could, in his televised signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, bring so many public figures of so many different rivalries and hatreds together in the same room, we have a risk-averse boor.

Never mind the power of such a personality, which could will the likes of then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (representing a half-dozen members of his family), Senators Hubert H. Humphrey and Everett Dirksen, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Dr. King, and hand these men the commemorative pens that Johnson used to enact this monumental bill.

Cast aside, too, the president’s special message before Congress on March 15, 1965, where he says the words of that old Negro spiritual:

“WE SHALL OVERCOME.”

The president continues:

“The time of justice has now come. I tell you that I believe sincerely that no force can hold it back. It is right in the eyes of man and God that it should come. And when it does, I think that day will brighten the lives of every American.”

Those are the not words of an opportunist; this is not the language of a cautious enforcer of the status quo.

So profound is President Johnson’s sacrifice, and so spiteful is the response to his speech by Southern Democrats, that he knowingly forfeits his electoral fortune to Republicans and endures the fury of every segregationist politician from his own party.

“Selma” also does Dr. King a disservice by changing events with such abandon. It introduces our current generation of teens and college students to an actor (David Oyelowo) charged with an impossible mission: To convincingly embody the spirit of America’s greatest orator since Franklin Roosevelt and our greatest public writer since Abraham Lincoln.

 

A Grave Wrong Called ‘Justice’: The Betrayal of the California Dream

 

 

I am a proud Californian.

We are a people of movement, glorified for our ambitions and our ambitious belief in education. 

And yet, the public temples of education that dot the California landscape – the universities once celebrated by their letters or location alone, like UCLA, San Diego, Santa Cruz, Berkeley or Irvine – no longer cast their lights around the world, but stand, instead, in the harsh glare of a different spotlight.

It is the klieg light of interrogation, and the megawatt rays of the guard tower. It is the displacement of first-class institutions of higher learning, the professoriate expelled by massive cutbacks and departments closed by lack of funding; a dream postponed, if not permanently denied . . . while we build more and more prisons.

We call these “campuses” Folsom, San Quentin, Mule Creek, High Desert and Pelican Bay: The graduate schools, so to speak, for offenders raised by, in the words of one inmate’s memoir, “Mother California”; the iron bars that juvenile offenders mistake for a crib and lifetime inmates know is the only home they will ever have.

These facts are a depressing snapshot of our civilization.

This penal colony, which has an institution for every age and every type of criminal, contains a series of “youth farms,” where cruelty is routine and savagery is standard.

It is a perverse universe, where guards pit inmates against one another in gladiatorial games of extreme violence, as onlookers place their bets and warning shots fired from a high-velocity rifle inaugurate and conclude each contest.

These farms, even the name is a racist throwback to the plantations African-Americans once maintained in the Deep South, are the community colleges of California’s new version of state-funded education.

The characters that emerge from this darkness, illiterate and contemptuous of any visible sign of humanity, will never be free, no matter how brief their layover between reentry into society and their return to prison may be.

As a former Juvenile Probation Commissioner for the City and County of San Francisco, I know what doom looks like. It is the despair of circumstance, where opportunity is scarce and a two-parent family is rarer still.

I know where those emotionally confined children live in Northern California, and I know where they gather in Southern California.

Having volunteered at Camp David Gonzales (a probation facility for Los Angeles County), options are few and outcomes are predictable: Existence, instead of living; and indifference, instead of compassion.

We, the citizens and taxpayers of California, are responsible for this moral crime.

In our relentless demand for order, we ignore the insatiable need for justice. The two are not the same because what is legal is not always right, and what is right is not always legal.

Our duty is to recognize this distinction, separating the cheated (of a sane and safe neighborhood) from the evil.

The latter – the murderers, molesters and rapists – are not our brothers in spirit, nor icons for mercy.

They are evil not in some abstract biblical way, inexplicable and beyond our understanding, but very much of this world.

They are not victims, but remorseless victimizers, who prey upon the old and infirm, the innocence of children and the vulnerability of defenseless women.

Prison is where these brutes should be. It is where they must be.

But we must ourselves avoid brutality.

Remember: Prison should be – it already is – punitive. It does not need to be a sterile version of hell, or an unrelenting box of psychological terror.

Our responsibility is to save the troubled and the wayward boys (and girls, too) among us before they become members of a gang and the foster children of Mother California.

We owe them salvation, not damnation.

 

 

 

Elizabeth Rice Grossman